This past January (2014) I led twenty-five Whitworth students on a study program of ancient Christian sites in Turkey. Our first and last stop was in Istanbul, a city that in my experience rivals Jerusalem for its evocative character. Historically speaking, Istanbul is like a cake composed of three radically different layers. The bottom layer is its deep and rich eleven centuries of Byzantine history, from the founding of the city by Constantine in 330 until its fall in 1453. The second layer, less than half that length of time but no less significant, is the transformation of the Byzantine Christian city into the capital of the Islamic world by the Ottoman Turks from 1453 until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I in 1918. The top layer is the republic of Turkey initiated by Ataturk in the 1920s and 30s and extending to the present, in which Western and secular influences have sought to displace remnants of the Ottoman era in the same way the Ottomans sought to displace the Byzantines.

The only living remnant of the Byzantine Christian world in Istanbul today is the Phanar, the “Vatican” of the Orthodox Church that is confined to a small but charismatic outpost along the Golden Horn. The Phanar is not listed as a “must see” sight in any guide of Istanbul that I know of. Millions of Christians visit Istanbul each year, but few visit the Phanar, and most probably know nothing of its existence. Whenever I visit Istanbul I schedule a visit there as a way of bearing witness to “the communion of the saints” throughout both time and space, and to ecumenical solidarity with a tangible element of “the suffering church.”

The Phanar is the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of all Orthodox churches in the world. His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew, a Western-educated Turk, has been patriarch since 1991. He is the 244th patriarch in unbroken succession since Constantine, known for his outspoken advocacy of Orthodox believers who have suffered decimating pograms and policies in twentieth-century Turkey, and for raising ecological consciousness among Christians the world over. The Patriarchal Library at the Phanar is one of the oldest unpillaged libraries in the world: the first copy of the Didache was discovered there in 1875, and sometime around 1910 several theretofore unknown treatises of Archimedes were also discovered there. The mathematical theories that emerged from the latter related to curved surfaces, calculus, combinatorics (theory of probability), and the concept of infinity distinguish Archimedes as the greatest scientist of antiquity—and perhaps of all time. The library is virtually inaccessible today (I can attest from personal experience) because Western scholars are accused of stealing some of its contents. The monks are happy to show you the Church of St. George, however, and this, along with the newly minted mosaics in the Patriarchal House, make the visit worth most worthwhile. The iconostasis—the screen separating the sanctuary from the altar—is a stunning creation of intricate woodcarvings covered in gold leaf. The two-headed gold eagle in its center signifies the Orthodox concept of church and state—not the separation of church and state as we know in the West, but their fusion in the Byzantine world. For Christians who revere the Cappadocian Fathers, the Church of St. George is particularly thrilling. In 2004—exactly 800 years after they were commandeered in the Fourth Crusade and taken to Rome in 1204—the relics of St. Gregory of Nazianzus (the Theologian) and St. John Chrysostom were returned to the Phanar by Pope John Paul II. Just this past year, the relics of another Cappadocian, St. Basil the Great, were returned to the Phanar as well. Two of our students delivered lectures on Chrysostom at his reliquary in the Church. Deacon Nephon, our Orthodox host, listened to their lectures confessed his pleasure at seeing such knowledge and esteem among Protestants for those revered by the Orthodox.

Today the Phanar oversees a dwindling Orthodox population in Istanbul. In 1900, one in every three persons in Istanbul was Orthodox; today, one in every 750 persons in Istanbul is Orthodox. There are now fewer than 2,000 Orthodox in a population of fifteen million in Istanbul. They may be on the verge of extinction. One should be cautious, however, before writing the obituary of a people and institution that have survived more than seventeen tumultuous centuries. The Istanbul Orthodox undoubtedly face a difficult future, but their tenacity in the face of discrimination and persecution witnesses to their faith and courage. Patriarch Bartholomew reminds the West that the militant secularism faced by the church in Turkey is only another form of the same secularism faced by the church in the West. Perhaps our common adversity will help open our eyes to our common Faith and the oneness of the Body of Christ.

In Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk confesses his “overwhelming melancholy” regarding Istanbul. I sense a similar melancholy, although I lament the loss of its Byzantine rather than Ottoman past (as does Pamuk). Melancholy causes us to remember, even if only by way of lament, past goods and glories, and that is not a bad thing. Melancholy is an inevitable consequence—for Christians as well as non-Christians—of taking evil, suffering, and tragedy seriously. The danger of melancholy is making it the final word, “if only . . . .” If only Jerusalem had not fallen (Ps 137). If only the Holy Land had not been conquered by Islam. If only Christians were not being so persecuted in the world today. If only the influence of Christianity were not waning in European and American culture. To drop anchor in the bay of melancholy is ultimately to deny the sovereignty of God, for God, in his inscrutable wisdom and power, has not only allowed these and many other things to occur, but he intends to bring newness from them. If melancholy has a positive purpose for the Christian it is to open doors to new forms of hope. “Let goods and kindred go,” wrote Luther, “this mortal life also. The body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still.” Therein is the hope of melancholy: the grave is the necessary prerequisite of resurrection, where God makes all things new.
Steven Runciman, the outstanding scholar of the Byzantine world, captures this collision of emotions in a moving eulogy on the Phanar:

The Phanar is lost in uncertainty and fear . . . . It is as the seers of Byzantium foretold, the prophets that spoke incessantly of the fate that was coming, of the final days of the City. The weary Byzantine knew that the doom so often threatened must some day surely envelop him. And what did it matter? It was needless to complain. This world was a foolish travesty, haunted with pain and with sorrowful memories and foreboding. Peace and true happiness lay beyond. What was the Emperor, the Peer of the Apostles, what even was Constantinople itself, the great City dear to God and to His Mother, compared to Christ Pantocrator and the glorious Courts of Heaven?*

]]>http://www.clcumary.com/james-edwards-on-orthodoxy-in-istanbul/feed/0Video: Dr. Peter Huff on C.S. Lewis and Vocationhttp://www.clcumary.com/video-dr-peter-huff-on-c-s-lewis-and-vocation/
http://www.clcumary.com/video-dr-peter-huff-on-c-s-lewis-and-vocation/#commentsFri, 27 Sep 2013 16:25:22 +0000http://www.clcumary.com/?p=1799Read more →]]>On Tuesday, September 24, C. S. Lewis expert Dr. Peter Huff of Centenary College (Shreveport, Louisiana) presented a talk entitled “Life to the Glory of God: C.S. Lewis and the Joy of Vocation.” Fifty years after his death, C. S. Lewis remains one of the most respected Christian writers of all time. The lecture celebrated Lewis the reliable guide to the demands of Christian discipleship. Exploring the seven callings that shaped his unrepeatable life, historian and theologian Peter Huff shed new light on the sense of vocation that gave Lewis’s experience its distinctive confidence and vigor. Pope John Paul II once observed that C. S. Lewis “knew his apostolate—and did it.” This tribute to the creator of Narnia and the twentieth century’s foremost apologist challenged us all to listen for the voice of God, and live to the glory of God.

]]>http://www.clcumary.com/video-dr-peter-huff-on-c-s-lewis-and-vocation/feed/0Jason Byassee on Christian Leadershiphttp://www.clcumary.com/christian-leadership-an-interview-with-jason-byassee/
http://www.clcumary.com/christian-leadership-an-interview-with-jason-byassee/#commentsThu, 29 Sep 2011 17:00:36 +0000http://www.clcumary.com/?p=77Read more →]]>Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee is Pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, N.C., and was recently Director of the Faith and Leadership Center at Duke Divinity School where he remains a Fellow in Theology and Leadership.

Jason, what is leadership? What is Christian leadership?

John Maxwell describes is as “influence: nothing more, nothing less.” That’s appealing in one way – we’ve all known people in positions of authority who weren’t really leaders, and people who are genuine leaders without a position of authority. But Ron Heifetz argues one needs something less amoral, so leadership has to be influence for good, otherwise monsters who are influential count as “leaders.”

The second question is more interesting. Christian leadership would have to mean building Christ’s church. Dostoevsky speaks of loving another person as an act of seeing them as God intends them to be. Leading them would be then encouraging them toward that divine intention.

What did you learn leading the leadership center at Duke Divinity School?

What a gift it is for institutional leaders to get to lift their heads out of the weeds of their work to be inspired again, and see anew why they got in in the first place. I remember being in a meeting of Methodist bishops in which their conversation crackled. I asked a colleague why they were so animated. “They never actually talk to each other,” she said. “They just push papers around.” A simple gift to leaders is to talk to them about the big-ticket stuff: God, the world, Christ, the church, and give them space and resources to talk to one another and interesting outsiders about things that matter.

The other is how much more interesting it is to speak of institutional leadership than individual. This is the single most important intellectual move we’re making at Leadership Education, and we hope to change the language in the ecology of the church out there. No one needs more individual geniuses; we desperately need more people practicing the arts of leadership for the sake of the church.

What does the future hold for divinity/seminary education? Many people are talking about alternative models.

The good money bet would be on smaller schools closing and some of the middle sized schools merging. We just have too many schools. It’s very hard to kill an institution – alumni rally to their defense – but with less money coming from denominations and everybody pinched financially it’s hard to see a viable future for, say, two Methodist seminaries in Ohio (to pick on my own people). The interesting new experiments are large congregations starting their own schools and online educational efforts which may soon dwarf residential schools in terms of number of graduates. Whether the latter can produce people practiced in the arts of Christian community is a genuinely open question (of course, whether residential seminaries can do this is open as well, with lots more data to the contrary…).

What do you say to people whose eyes glaze over at the concept of ‘leadership,’ who may feel it’s a mere buzzword from corporate culture?

They’re right of course, it is a buzzword, and it does come from business. But theology rarely, if ever, works with “pure” concepts unsullied by the world. The trick with any concept we may find useful is to fill it with specifically Christological content and then see if it’s helpful. If it’s just a fad and it fades, fine. But our tradition is rich with images of leadership, from Moses mediating with God at Sinai to the prophets speaking a hard word to Jesus choosing and training and forgiving the twelve to Paul trusting others to do ministry in communication but not in company with himself. Of course the primary image for specifically Christian leadership has to be the pastor, speaking to the people on behalf of God and speaking to God on behalf of the people; bringing the people’s gifts to the altar and blessing them to give back to the people.

How would you encourage someone who’s a leader but doesn’t really think in terms of leadership to start thinking about leadership and consciously developing leadership skills?

Some people do something with intuitive brilliance. Not all such people have to become experts in talking about what they do or in training others to do it. But someone has to.

What are the best and worst things leaders can do when first stepping into a position?

The best thing is to listen well, especially to the “weaker members,” as the Rule of St. Benedict puts it. Also to pray, ask for advice from peers in similar situations, build a network of friends that one can keep on speed-dial. The worst things involve panicking, keeping your own press clippings, having a long memory of wrongs, and thinking the institution is there to serve you rather than the reverse.

You and your wife have been in pastoral ministry. What are the most pressing leadership challenges facing clergy, and how does one exercise leadership regarding them?

Remarkably the same through time and place: love the people and preach the gospel. Other stuff comes and goes. Pastors I’ve known vary enormously on how good a friend they are. If they’re good at friendship they tend to thrive in ministry, and if not . . .

Thinking of certain social issues roiling churches and parishes in these days regarding, say, poverty, capital punishment, other life issues, sexuality, and so forth, how should Christian leaders – lay or ordained – handle such controversial issues, especially when there is so little Christian agreement on them and when one’s own views might differ from one’s congregation or constituency?

Not to be afraid to address them, communally, scripturally, through the tradition, with grace for those who disagree. The worst thing is to shrink from speaking a clear word. And to remember we’re pastors, not experts on hot-button stuff, not commentators on cable, not pontificators. The one thing we can’t fail to do is preach Christ and him crucified; whether our people have correct opinions on this or that issue of the day is relatively far less important.

How does leadership relate to consensus? When a leader is driving a major initiative or taking an institution or group in a new direction, is it OK to lose people?

Sure. The leader, above all, is there to make decisions others can’t make. But she or he would be a fool not to discern the Spirit’s intention in the church at the moment (a very hard task!). Having so discerned, I don’t think we have to wait for unanimity, although some churches do – it’s a sign of the Spirit’s movement, for example, among some Mennonites. Then it is indeed OK to lose people, but it is like severing a limb.

Must a leader always have some big project, some major initiative going, or is it OK simply to make the trains run on time?

One leadership consultant said to me that parishioners are like children, if they don’t have anywhere to go, if they’re just standing there on the corner, they’ll start fighting. I’m not sure that’s true – it’s certainly patronizing! And I worry about starting initiatives just because one thinks it’s obligatory. Eugene Peterson speaks wisely of the first work of the pastor being to pray and preside and preach Scripture and attend to the place.

Language is always rhetorical, of course, but so many people nowadays use language to obfuscate, to hide, to dissemble, to spin. How should leaders speak when speaking publicly?

Stanley Hauerwas’s one request of any leader: “Don’t lie to me. You may not know the answer, but say so. Don’t lie.” It’s not a bad place to start on any moral question. Nicholas Lash says truthful speech is the first casualty of original sin. Adam eats, and pretty soon we have words like “collateral damage.” Leaders should not be asked to say everything they know – they’re charged also to guard what people have told them in confidence, as any good priest knows. But that doesn’t justify the way leaders both churchly and civic feel they can twist the truth.

The Church is a mixed body, and people are mixed persons. How should leaders handle scandal in their organizations, their churches, their families, their own lives?

PR people are often better at this than church people, scandalously enough. They say to say everything you know when you know it, don’t try to spin or hide, be as cooperative with internal and external authorities as you can, and you not only will be perceived as turning the corner back toward truth – you actually will be doing so.

What do Christian leaders need to do to prepare for and meet the challenges of the relatively new, post-Constantinian, secular age in which we now find ourselves? How might one exercise countercultural leadership in a post-Christian culture?

Well, one key source of learning is conversation and friendship with Christian leaders in the majority world. In Africa or Asia or Latin America it’s often illuminating to learn that Christians are called to be “servant-leaders,” to lead in a way that doesn’t enrich themselves or their families but that rather makes us less for the sake of our people or organization, in imitation of Christ’s kenosis [see Philippians 2:5-11 – ed.]. Here in the US the “servant-leader” language sounds sort of dusty and dated, there it’s a revelation. Of course our speaking into their reality will require their speaking into ours, and they often say we’re not nearly biblical enough, morally serious enough, generous enough.

Back on our turf, we still have these undead zombie-like stories from the 60s that say Christians need to be more “open to the world,” leave our specific religious language, be hip like the culture, and so on. But part of the shift in the world is that people don’t know the gospel, the stories of Scripture, even the basic teachings of the church. So far from needing to tone down our specificity, leaders in the future will have to teach these things from scratch to basically pagan people. This will be made harder by the long legacy of the religious right in this country using religious language to pummel opponents and gain votes. But we’re back where Lesslie Newbigin said we were already in the 80s: in a mission field, not a fresh one, but one that thinks it’s heard the gospel and rejected it. The truth is, as G.K. Chesterton noted, it’s never actually tried the gospel at all.

Preachers are leaders. How do you evaluate the state of preaching today? What can be done at various levels to improve it? What would you recommend to a preacher who feels he or she is struggling, or doing relatively will but who would like to improve?

Hard to generalize. Will Willimon, in his introduction to a series of sermons preached over almost a century at Duke Chapel, was surprised to find the more recent sermons the more biblically attentive, Christologically focused, and rhetorically successful entries. I take from Greg Jones that leaders of all kinds need to read very, very widely: theology, fiction, homiletics, social science, the newspaper, tons of history. A voracious appetite for words, for stories truly told, is surely part of the battle.

What books on leadership would you recommend? Any you would avoid?

Hugh Heclo’s book on institutions, On Thinking Institutionally, is quite good and accessible. In his books Better and Complications Atul Gawande writes in convincing ways about the skills required for being a good physician – lots of them include things like communicating well, reacting on one’s feet when one doesn’t have full knowledge, admitting wrong after the fact (all easy parallels). Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule is probably still unsurpassed in pastoral leadership literature. In general we Americans tend to speak of leadership as though it were a solo art. It never is. Reading good biographies of leaders (both failed and successful) is a way of seeing that no one births themselves. We always come from vibrant institutions and in turn give ourselves back to other vibrant institutions.

Any final thoughts you’d like to share with our leaders?

Thanks for the chance to talk about things that are desperately important!

“Preaching is truth through personality.” So said Philip Brooks, the great 19th century Episcopal preacher from Boston, Massachusetts. But is he correct? What role, if any, do our unique personalities play in the task of preaching? Doesn’t our humanness get in the way of God’s revelation? Isn’t there a danger that our personality will obscure the truth of God? These are healthy questions for us to ponder as pastors and priests as we prepare to bring the truth of God on a weekly basis to the congregations which God has entrusted into our care.

The nature of God’s revelation to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ is a good place for us to begin as we explore this issue. In Jesus, God is fully revealed to us; he is the Word of God which became flesh and dwelt among us. Is it the humanness of Christ, however, that reveals God to us? Or does His humanness act as a veil? When the Word becomes flesh, it does not stop being the Word. But one must not forget that when the Word becomes flesh, the flesh does not become the Word. Therefore, as Karl Barth argues, the flesh acts as both a veil and a means of unveiling: “But this very veiling, kenosis and passion of the Logos, has to take place in order that it may lead to His unveiling and exaltation and so to the completion of revelation” (CD I.2, p. 36). Therefore, it is important to realize that God is not revealed in the humanity of Jesus Christ, which is actually a veil, but in his divinity.

It was possible, therefore, to meet Jesus Christ in the flesh and yet to deny his divinity. In other words, it was possible to experience Jesus during his life on earth as any other man. Not only was this possible, but it is quite apparent from the Gospel accounts that this is what actually happened some, if not most, of the time. Pilate was able to look Jesus Christ – God’s own Truth – squarely in the face and question, “What is truth?” As Trevor Hart points out, for revelation to take place, “the particular form of Jesus’ humanity is necessary but not sufficient. The veil must become transparent.”

This takes place through the ongoing revelatory work of the Holy Spirit. Without the flesh of Jesus, however, without his humanness, without his personality he would not have been present to be revealed. To turn Hart’s statement on its head, while the humanness of Jesus was not sufficient to reveal the truth, it was necessary. This is the miracle of the Incarnation, that God’s revelation — God’s Truth — was mediated through the unique personality of Jesus Christ.

Likewise, the four Gospels each have their own style, their own voice, their own personality. One is not more true than the others because of its unique personality. No, God’s truth is mediated through the unique personalties of each author. This is true of the prophets of the Old Testament as well as the apostles of the New Testament. The personality of Elijah is different from Paul, or David, or James, or Jeremiah; their personalities are not God’s revelation to humanity, they are not God’s timeless truth, but in obedience they allowed their styles, their voices, and their personalities to be mediators of God’s truth.

In the same way, your unique style, voice and personality can be used by God to communicate His truth if it is made subservient to the Word of God. Of course this is key: we must keep our personalities subservient to the Word of God. There is always the danger of allowing the power of a dynamic personality to overtake the power of the gospel. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to make sure that the preacher spend more time preparing himself as a follower of Christ than as a preacher of Christ.

As preachers we must spend regular time participating in both private and public worship that molds us, conforms us, and prepares us to be purveyors of the Word. This will ensure that the focus remains the Truth and not the personality.

If we are careful to keep our personalities subservient to the Truth, then as we get to know our congregation and its personality and as our congregations get to know us and our personalities, a unique opportunity is created, a window is opened, a trust is developed. Through the power of the Holy Spirit this opportunity is used to communicate God’s timeless truth to a particular congregation at a particular place and at a particular time.

May The Father, through the power of the Spirit, use each of us and our unique personalities to reveal the Truth of the Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

The Rev. Kerry L. Bender is the pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

]]>http://www.clcumary.com/the-rev-kerry-bender-on-preaching-and-personality/feed/0Josh Genig on the Sacramentality of Preachinghttp://www.clcumary.com/incarnational-preaching/
http://www.clcumary.com/incarnational-preaching/#commentsThu, 13 Oct 2011 16:35:46 +0000http://www.clcumary.com/?p=189Read more →]]>There seems to be renewed talk today about the sacramentality of preaching. Certainly, some of the more prominent figures of the Nouvelle Théologie movement associated with Vatican II are most responsible for this, even if their influence be rather indirect. After all, it was those theologians who, in working within the confines of the Council that promulgated the confession of a four-fold presence of Christ in the liturgy (in the priest, the Eucharist, the worshiping assembly, and the Word of God), proposed that Christ was the primordial sacrament. Everything that has received his Christological touch, therefore, could be considered thoroughly sacramental. This includes his viva vox.

Yet, Catholics are not alone in searching for a more sacramental understanding of preaching. In fact, it is on this subject that Catholics and Protestants may find the most common ground. How these two ecclesial streams define the sacramental character of preaching, however, is dramatically different. But is either entirely correct?

When Roman Catholics speak of preaching as sacramental, they are usually proposing that preaching should properly find its place in the liturgy by pushing hearers toward the Sacrifice of the Mass. In other words, preaching is sacramental if it prepares the parishioner to receive the sacred mysteries. It is important to note, however, that the mysteries are not understood as being contained within the preaching task itself.

Protestants likewise understand preaching to be sacramental insofar as some propose that, within preaching, Christ is mediated to the present context. Calvin, of course, would speak of Christ being “near us” in preaching, “as though we were face-to-face.” For some Protestants, preaching is sacramental precisely because Christ is present in the preaching act. Yet, the Christ who is present in preaching is the same Christ, present in the same way, who comes to the Protestant in Holy Communion. He is a spiritual Christ. Therefore, while he may undoubtedly come to the hearer in preaching, he comes lacking corporeality.

I would propose, however, that preaching, when understood as sacramental in the most historic sense of the word, cannot be relegated to a word that pushes one toward the Mass or a word that delivers an intangible Christ. Instead, preaching today needs to be conceived of in a manner analogous to the Annunciation to Mary. Remember what occurred therein:

And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy – the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.

St. Jerome called the angel’s words a sermon (Luke 1:29). In other words, the angel preached a homily to her. And within the particularity of the angel’s sermon, Mary was not simply pushed toward the sacrifice of the temple, nor was she simply given a spiritual presence of the second person of the Trinity. On the other hand, when the angel preached this sermon to her, the very words he spoke were made flesh. The word, says Luther, crawled in through Mary’s ear and down to her womb. Or, to say it in Augustinian terms, the word came to an element and a sacrament was there. The Annunciation was a sacramental event and a sacramental word because of the sacramental preaching of the angel. In short, it was sacramental because it delivered the person of Jesus Christ. But was that cosmic event simply a one-off?

Remember what occurred at the creation of the world. The Lord said, in his own ineffable way, “Let there be […].” Yet, he said “Let there be” eight times. And eight is the eschatological number; it is the number that will have no end. So the Lord’s “Let there be” of creation came to meet Mary at the Annunciation. For this reason, it seems, she said so hopefully, joyfully, and optatively, “Let it be unto me […].” Mary received the “Let there be” of creation when she received the sacramental sermon of the angel. And she made the totality of what was delivered therein her own with the words of her fiat. Her “Let it be unto me” received the Lord’s “Let there be.” But an eschatological eight does not stop with Mary. What went for her goes for us, or so it seems from the image of the Church in Revelation 11-12.

What this means, of course, is that both pastors and lay people, speakers and hearers or, as Luther labeled us, givers and receivers, have a certain amount of responsibility at every service.

Pastors, who indeed stand in the stead of Jesus and speak by his command, must say what Jesus says (homologeo) in a way that people today can hear Jesus speaking to them. After all, if Jesus was aware of his cultural context, should not we be equally as aware of ours? Therefore, we need to find new and fresh ways to deliver – repeatedly – the message of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.

As for hearers, they should expect nothing short of a transformation when listening to a sermon. In other words, preaching is not intended, primarily, to educate us or give us a new piece of information. Rather, as with all communication between a lover and beloved, when the pastor speaks on Jesus’ behalf, what he delivers to us is the life and being of the One of whom he speaks.

To that end, if the Lord continues to speak a creative word, which his eight-sided “Let there be” would seem to imply, then we also can receive what he says today with a faithful fiat. And when we receive the word that is spoken to us by men who stand in persona Christi (2 Cor 2:10), we can have a share in the same divine life which once gave contour to creation and which, in deep humility, took on our contour in the Incarnation. And when Jesus is mediated to us in that way – tangibly, corporeally, sacramentally – he changes us, so that we might be sacraments to the entire world. Why? Precisely because when a sacramental word “words” us, we are, in turn, given a sacramental word to speak. And this dying world, as we know it, is in desperate need of a viva vox.

Rev. Joshua Genig is Pastor at The Lutheran Church of the Ascension in Atlanta, Georgia, and is finishing his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

]]>http://www.clcumary.com/incarnational-preaching/feed/0“The Enduring Legacy of Vatican II”http://www.clcumary.com/the-enduring-legacy-of-vatican-ii/
http://www.clcumary.com/the-enduring-legacy-of-vatican-ii/#commentsSun, 07 Oct 2012 18:04:36 +0000http://www.clcumary.com/?p=1282Read more →]]>Thanks to all who presented and attended and planned to make this event a success! The the website for the Diocese of Bismarck has a report as well as the videos below. Audio of the talks is available here; video of the talks will be available later this week.

]]>http://www.clcumary.com/the-enduring-legacy-of-vatican-ii/feed/0Sarah Hinlicky Wilson on Ecumenismhttp://www.clcumary.com/sarah-hinlicky-wilson-on-ecumenism/
http://www.clcumary.com/sarah-hinlicky-wilson-on-ecumenism/#commentsThu, 12 Apr 2012 15:20:44 +0000http://www.clcumary.com/?p=935Read more →]]>The Rev. Dr. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is a Lutheran minister and currently assistant research professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France.

The idea was born a number of years ago with a simple, “Gee, wouldn’t it be cool to walk through Europe following in Luther’s footsteps?” The old country still has that kind of pull on young Americans. But we (my husband Andrew and I) didn’t really have any way to make it happen until we moved to Strasbourg. Then, through my work in ecumenism, we both started thinking about the figure of Luther differently and realized that we had an intriguing chance to connect a seminal figure from the past with the ecumenical and theological concerns of the present. We imagined that the line of connection Luther had made in walking from Erfurt to Rome as a friar, long before he became a reformer, had been snapped by the 1521 bull of excommunication against him, and we wanted to reconnect the dots, so to speak, with our own feet. The social media component followed naturally (and our blog is still up: www.hereiwalk.org).

What do you think you accomplished? How have people on both the Protestant and Catholic sides reacted?

The response to our pilgrimage was overwhelmingly positive. We were most moved by the comments or messages from “mixed marriages” (such a horrible expression), i.e. people who live ecumenism within their own families. They are the real pioneers. Interestingly, addressing such concerns was the very first step in ecumenism. I think we also gave people, both Protestant and Catholic, a way of looking at Luther that was less ideological. I don’t think ecumenism can make any progress at all until all parties are willing to give up their convenient half-truths about both the past and the present. It’s ultimately an exercise in relentless honesty, carried on in a spirit of deep love.

You are currently assistant research professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France. Tell us about the Institute, and your work there.

The Institute was founded in 1965 in response to the Second Vatican Council. The Lutheran World Federation thought it necessary to have a house of studies devoted entirely to the question of the Lutheran churches’ relationship to other churches of the world. Our scholars pioneered the concept of “differentiated consensus” and were key drafters of the Leuenberg Agreement (1973) and the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999). I serve as a consultant to the International Lutheran-Orthodox Joint Commission—a role I was given after writing a dissertation on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, an Orthodox theologian who argued in favor of the ordination of women to the priesthood—and have been involved in preparatory conversations between Lutherans and Pentecostals.

What do you see when you survey the ecumenical landscape? Is it dead, or living differently than it did in the heady postwar days?

It’s not dead; it’s changing. Everyone I’ve met working in ecumenism realizes this and is striving to grasp what the new form will be. Ecumenism was chiefly about multilateral friendship-building and joint service during its first fifty years, and that was only among Protestants and Orthodox. The next fifty years, following Vatican II, focused on bilateral dialogue on theological topics. At this point, we all know that we’re in doctrinal spitting distance of each other, but that hasn’t translated into greater structural unity, and we still have a great deal of uninformed bigotry against other Christians within our ranks. The best guess right now is that the next phase of ecumenism will be a result of the entry into it of Evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals, who have been fairly suspicious of ecumenism up until now. The Global Christian Forum is facilitating some really exciting conversations between them and “experienced” ecumenists. That’s where I’d stake my money for the future.

What would Christian unity look like today? Is Christian unity possible this side of the Eschaton?

I imagine Christian unity as something like this: picture a Venn diagram, except 3D (so spheres instead of circles), bobbing along through space and time. Each church family is one of those spheres, and there is always overlap of some kind or another—doctrinal, spiritual, diaconal—though never a complete identity of the two. Which means some parts of each church family are in some kind of communion with another church family, while members of that same church family are not, or are perhaps in some kind of communion with another church family altogether. But even this is not quite right, because the more I learn of the various churches, the clearer it becomes the members of each are not fully in communion with each other, either. On what grounds can we defend non-communion with members of other church families when we tolerate all kinds of non-communion within our church families? How do we account for a fuller degree of unity and communion between members of separated churches that between those within one church? I don’t know the secret of Christian unity, but I’ve at least figured out that “unity” is a far more complex prospect than I’d ever imagined.

As a Catholic, I doubt very much we Catholics would surrender the papacy as we see the Petrine Office as an instrument of Christian unity, not an obstacle. As a Protestant, what would you like to see Rome do? As a Lutheran, what do you think Lutherans should do?

Your choice of words is interesting: “surrender.” The unfortunately widespread notion of ecumenism is that it’s some kind of barter—if you’ll give up this, I’ll give up that. Such an approach could only be mutually impoverishing, assuming it would even work, which it wouldn’t. I have no clearer idea than anyone else how to shape the papacy in a way that would truly be uniting and not dividing for the Orthodox and Protestant families, but one of the most exciting things I’ve heard about lately is the recent opening of an office in Rome that unites concerns of mission and ecumenism, so that the task of evangelization will not be undertaken under the shadow of competition between Christians. Since ecumenism originated in the mission field, I think its future lies in mission too, and if ecumenism is suffering or slowing down right now, it’s because it got severed from its missional roots—both “externally” to the nations and “internally” to the baptized (who are often further advanced in their paganism than non-Christians!).

Many people assume Christian faith is dead in Europe, what with advancing secularization and low levels of church attendance. How does the situation of Christian faith in Europe look to you from your vantage point in France?

It’s certainly pretty dreary to visit the gorgeous old church buildings of Europe on a Sunday morning and find them virtually empty. The disdain for the church was one of the most shocking things we found while on the Italy portion of our pilgrimage. But I think this is all a bit misleading. The “oldline” churches are indeed empty and withering. But every city of any size has multiple thriving churches built around immigrants, or new communities forming around Pentecostal/charismatic renewal. They are not public the way the oldline churches are, so they are somewhat invisible. But sooner or later the homogenous oldliners are going to realize that their future lies in extending the right hand of fellowship to the new arrivals, and perhaps in that partnership their own people will be revitalized in faith.

That’s very true—and it’s also true of the oldline churches themselves. 11% of the world’s Catholics are charismatic (that’s a staggering 110 million!). The Lutheran church of Ethiopia had 200,000 members in 1980 and has nearly 5 million today—and the astronomical growth is due to its explicit decision to incorporate charismatic practice into its Lutheran commitments. Still, far more of the Pentecostals and charismatics are found outside the oldline churches, and they seem to grow faster the more they divide, which is a bit alarming if you are committed to the unity of the church! My hunch at this point is that Pentecostal success derives from two principal factors. First, instead of giving lip service to the idea that all power and holiness comes from God—but in reality trying to flog ourselves into it by our own efforts—Pentecostals really believe it and act on it, and God responds generously. Second, Pentecostals have shed the old Christendom mentality far more effectively than older churches, perhaps because they were never accepted by the Christendom establishment in the first place. Thus their missions are not exercises in cultural imperialism, however gently managed, but allow an unprecedented freedom for indigenization. At some point, though, they are going to have to reconcile with the Christian past. If real ecumenical friendships could develop between them and the oldliners, we’d see an extraordinary renewal and deepening of faith and witness on all sides. So, in short, I’m not worried—I’m delighted.

Any final words?

The best on-the-ground idea I’ve heard for ecumenism comes from Steve Harmon’s little book, Ecumenism Means You, Too. He suggests that, in addition to your commitment to your own church family, you get to know another one, too—sort of like having a major and a minor. You can’t fix all the divisions all at once, but you can become a real bridge between two families of faith, mutually translating between the two and curing your own parochialism in the process. Ephesians 2:14 says that Christ “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility,” so as Christ-bearers ourselves, I think we are called to make the unity happen in our own bodies, too. That happens when we put our bodies in two different churches, give our voices to praise in them both, consume the holy supper with our mouths in them both, serve the needy with our hands in them both.

]]>http://www.clcumary.com/sarah-hinlicky-wilson-on-ecumenism/feed/1Read Schuchardt on Media, Tech, and Religionhttp://www.clcumary.com/read-schuchardt-on-media-tech-and-religion/
http://www.clcumary.com/read-schuchardt-on-media-tech-and-religion/#commentsTue, 29 Nov 2011 21:36:52 +0000http://www.clcumary.com/?p=442Read more →]]>Dr. Read Schuchardt is Associate Professor of Communication at Wheaton College (IL) and an expert in the effects of media and technology upon culture.

You have a doctoral degree in something called “Media Ecology.” What is that?

Media Ecology is the study of media as environments. Just as the study of natural ecology is the study of natural environments, media ecology looks at the man-made environment to consider how inputs and outputs in the technological milieu enhance or impede our species’ chances for survival. It’s a term coined by Marshall McLuhan in March 1968 and then put out into public by Neil Postman on November 24, 1968. At McLuhan’s suggestion, Postman created a graduate program in Media Ecology that lasted until Postman’s death in 2003. So while I didn’t graduate until 2005 from New York University’s program in Media Ecology, I was fortunate enough (beginning grad school in 1995) to study under Dr. Postman for eight years.

Which thinkers have influenced you the most, and why?

In chronological order of influence, they would have to be: G.K. Chesterton, Mortimer Adler, Walker Percy, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul and Walter Ong. Adler’s book How To Think About God: A Guidebook for the 20th Century Pagan came along at just the right time in my life and made me more intellectually honest with myself. Chesterton pushed me over the edge into committing to the faith. It was life-changing to discover Postman, who described the world I lived in (in 1992) better than any other single author, and who was himself influenced by McLuhan, Ong, and Ellul (among others). Postman more than anyone else gave me hope that the world was understandable and he personally put me on my life’s path of becoming a professor — without him, I’d still be in the corporate communications world, doing advertising, marketing, or public relations. As I read deeper and further, going beyond our grad school syllabi, it was thrilling to discover that McLuhan was profoundly influenced by Chesterton, that Ong was a former student of McLuhan’s, that Ellul’s two greatest influences were Karl Marx and Karl Barth, and that all of these thinkers were either devout Christians or else deeply impressed (in Postman’s case) with the need to take religion seriously. So for me the value of these thinkers was that they allowed me to be in the world and yet not of it at the same time, to engage with the world’s thinking and understanding of itself in the historical moment, but to also live in a dialectic with the Incarnation, what McLuhan called the “thing” or the “fact” of revelation. Ellul said he faced alone this world he lived in, tried to understand it, and confronted it with another reality he lived in, yet which was utterly unverifiable. I find these thinkers to be like-minded with my own thinking because they found life in just one (sacred) or the other (secular) realms to be fairly flat if not downright boring or stultifying. But embracing both, and bringing them into dialogue with each other, well, since then I’ve never been bored.

What’s bad and good about technology?

It’s fast, cheap, effective, and cool. That’s the good part. The bad part is that it’s fast, cheap, effective, and cool. If we become what we behold, my concern with technology is not what we do with it, but what it does to us. The analogy I’ve been using most recently is the question of prostitution. What’s wrong with prostitution is fairly obvious, but in general it’s always going to be there, from being the world’s oldest profession to being increasingly legalized all around the globe. The answer to the “problem” of prostitution is, I believe, not actually to be engaged on the mass or group level, but on the individual level. This is why neither Jesus nor Thomas Aquinas (for example) argue against prostitution, but do argue against the personal effects. The Ten Commandments obliges the individual to “not commit adultery” — it never suggests that thou shalt outlaw prostitution. Jesus forgives the woman caught in adultery, on the one hand, but on the other he doesn’t makes light of her sin and he gives a far sterner warning to men: if you have lusted after a woman internally then this is tantamount to adultery. So he both raises the personal bar and lowers the group cost. And this gets to the heart, I think, of both real freedom and how real freedom in the face of technological determinants should be conceived — we don’t want sobriety by outlawing alcohol, we want sobriety by achieving self-control while in a bar with friends. Which is to say, freedom comes on the individual level, which is always highly contextualized, contingent, and culturally framed. People in Singapore aren’t free from the negative effects of chewing gum; they are free from the temptation of chewing gum because the whole country has outlawed it. That’s not real freedom, which always involves a choice. In the same way, there is no technology, even those that are inherently “bad,” that should be eliminated (okay: maybe nuclear weapons could go), but there are collective effects of technology that individuals can be made aware of and can personally resist. So I can walk while texting and call it multitasking, but if it makes me bump into things or people I can also be conscious of this likely effect and thereby choose to text only when I’m not moving so I don’t pose a risk to myself or others.

What technologies are good and helpful?

This is an unanswerable question, because it forces a non-existent dichotomy. All technologies have a “good and helpful” aspect and they also have a harmful and debilitating effect. I like chairs, which seem utterly neutral or positive as a technological invention — especially nice big, comfy chairs. But cultures that sit on chairs experience more colon cancer than cultures that squat. Neil Postman argued that all technologies are a “Faustian bargain” – they give something, and they take something away. Freedom, I think, comes in knowing what these two things are, and in making the choice of which you value more. In our household, we’re still not squatting. One of my favorite technologies is the bicycle, since I can hardly think of anything bad that could come from it, and since it increases, health, happiness, and enjoyment of the outdoors in almost all its uses. But if you’re Lance Armstrong, chances are good you know precisely what can go wrong if you ride a bike too much.

How does one discern between good and bad technology? Discernment is the key, and it is discernment not that tells you which is good and which is bad, but tells you that every technology has both a good and a bad side, and then lets you discern whether or not you want to use it. My favorite example of this is the Bruderhof community who noticed that after using television for a year, their children had stopped singing the community songs and spiritual hymns they used to sing on the playground. So the decision was not over the question, “Is television good or bad?” The question became, “Which do we value more: good television or singing children?” And that to me is true discernment.

Explain the important distinction between tools and tech.

Well, I would say that all technology can be either a tool, a toy, or a weapon. And some of this is inherently obvious, but sometimes the definition is dictated by the user’s intention, such as when the butler commits murder with the candlestick: here’s a tool that’s being used as a weapon. In modern mass culture, most toys are children’s (i.e., miniaturized and ineffectual) versions of adult tools or weapons. But in the Garden of Eden, Jacques Ellul argues that there could be no technology, because to have a technology would imply that something was incomplete, missing, or in need of repair — which is contradictory to a “perfect” or “complete” world. I would refine his argument by saying that man in the garden could have had toys, and that the fall of man can be seen as recognizing the effect of technology’s uses. The word “fruit” can be read as “effect” quite consistently with other uses of the term in scripture, such as the “fruit of the spirit” or “by their fruits you shall know them.” And there is no knowledge of good and evil like knowing how good intentions can lead straight to hell. So a toy can become a tool can become a weapon startlingly quickly – perhaps the strongest example of this is the “dawn of man” scene in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. You see the ape-man playing with a bone as a toy, moving other bones with it. Then he discovers its properties as a tool, since he can make other bones dance, move, or jump as a result of where and how hard he hits them. And then, almost instantaneously, he discovers that by hitting hard enough, he can smash the skull of a dead animal, and the scene then intercuts with him smashing the skull of a living animal in order to kill it. All this seems fairly consistent with the fall of man and the immediate necessity for killing animals to have their skins for coverings, and the exile from the garden, the loss of community (and communication, according to Josephus) with the animal kingdom, and the wandering in exile. You can also read the Cain and Abel story as the first recognition (and survival threat) of technological superiority. Cain the farmer kills Abel the domesticator of animals because he sees his way of life threatened, the way the iceman would naturally resent the refrigerator salesman.

Was the print revolution of the 15th-16th centuries an advance over prior oral and written culture? What was gained? What was lost?

Wow — that’s a huge question, and dissertations have been written on it and it’s still not fully answered. What was gained, thanks to Martin Luther and the power of the printing press, was the right to challenge the abuses of the church without necessarily burning at the stake for doing so (if only Jan Hus had this technology!) But without the printing press, Martin Luther would most likely have died an unknown heretic who violated all three of his monastic vows (chastity, obedience, poverty). As I understand it, modern Catholicism sees this portion of its history as a failure on their part to not internally reform soon enough. The other thing that was gained was representative money, an impossibility without the printing press to make receipts for the gold on store. But if the printing press created “Sola Scriptura” at the expense of orality (i.e., “tradition”), it also created more than just a “single” Protestant Reformation. According to the World Encyclopedia of Christianity, the “one true church” now has over 33,000 officially recognized denominations. And if military victories go to the technologically superior entity, then it’s certainly the case that the church has become impotent through a “divide and conquer” scheme — by their fruits shall you know them! So what was gained was greater intellectual freedom for the individual, vernacular translations of scripture, capitalism, democracy, the nation-state, nationalism, patriotism, and a massive increase in both the words of a language and the literacy of the population. What was lost was, ultimately, a coherent and meaningful narrative by which people led their lives. The psychological security of the average medieval peasant was, I think, far more profound than that of today’s well-paid, well-insured, well-adjusted citizen who is doing fine but taking Prozac to keep his ennui or depression at bay. If I’m a member of the one true church, but then have to choose between 33,000 denominations, well suddenly the whole thing gets called into question and people like Richard Dawkins start to make a lot more sense because they at least have one consistent story that solves the paralysis of choice quite easily: choose either (a) believe nothing, or (b) believe one of these 33,000 tales. If freedom requires a choice, then technology requires an efficiency to those choices, and most people simply don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to go through all their options on the believe side of the ledger. So I think, ultimately, atheism is a natural outgrowth of all this, the way nudity is the end result of too many fashion choices (this was the point of Robert Altman’s film Pret-A-Porter). It becomes the last resort of the rational mind, even as it defeats its own purpose.

What do you say to people who claim technology/media are neutral? Isn’t it possible to put content into various forms?

I’m very nice to people who say this. McLuhan, however, called them “technological idiots.” On a case by case basis, it’s fairly simple to demonstrate that there is no such thing as a “neutral” technology. The classic example is nuclear energy: you can split the atom to make bombs or to make cheap electricity, so it’s all in how you use it, the argument goes. But as Ellul points out in The Technological Society, even nuclear development had to go through the bomb-making phase before it arrived at “clean green nuclear energy.” And of course, ask the people of Japan how “neutral” they think nuclear energy is — after living through Hiroshima and Fukushima, there is a pretty strong recognition that nuclear energy is not neutral. Right now Germany and Switzerland, largely as a result of Fukushima, have voted to be entirely nuclear-energy-free within the coming decades.

To the second part of your question, the answer is of course, yes, but the when you put content into various forms you change the content subtly but significantly. The classic example here is the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate. If you heard the debate on radio, you thought Nixon won because he made better points and argued more rationally. If you saw it on TV, you thought Kennedy won because he looked better, presented better, and contrasted better (with his darker suit and facial make-up) on a black-and-white TV screen than Nixon did, who looked washed out and old. So the medium really does affect the message, as McLuhan argued. For Christians, one of the strangest (and perhaps hardest to recognize) things was that Christ never wrote anything down, never asked anyone to write anything down, and never suggested that salvation could or would come from the written word. If anything, he was the living embodiment of the spoken word in real time, which was the key to his power against the state, against the ruling religious authorities, and against what Neil Postman called the “hardening of the categories” that writing had created. His reduction of 613 written Jewish laws to just two is only imaginable by the power of speech, and his saving of the woman caught in adultery is equally impossible without live words spoken to living people in a courtroom setting. He recognizes the law but says, “Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone” and bingo-presto, case dismissed! Technically, this was a mistrial because the judge, jury, and executioner had all left, so there was no one left to “hold court” with the accused. This story is the one time we get Jesus writing anything down in all of Scripture, and to this day there are as many theories of what he wrote down in the sand as there are theorists. I see it as a New Testament parallel to the written law of God that Moses breaks on the way down Mt. Sinai, but I’m no theologian. The irony, of course, is that we only know all this because someone did write it down, and that someone is ultimately, God. But McLuhan asks a good question when he wonders why early missionaries transmitted phonetic literacy along with the gospel everywhere they went, since the one has nothing to do with the other. And it is a strange but known fact that literacy is the basis of technological development for a country, and yet technological development is one of the surest signs that a culture will lose its faith. So the paradoxes abound.

Again and again Christian leaders – Protestant and Catholic – have called for the churches to make ever better use of technology to proclaim the Gospel. Is this naive? Unavoidable? Helpful?

Yes. Watch the YouTube video “Contemporvant Growtivation” to see this in action. This makes brilliant satirical fun of the increasing use of technology to transmit the gospel. I think Ellul has it right when he says that the church cannot make use of propaganda (i.e., modern technology and its communication techniques) without becoming a purely sociological institution, and so I think it presents a growing crisis for the church, but I’m in a very small minority with this perception. Ellul says that what is done in the service of Jesus Christ should take its character and effectiveness from Jesus Christ, which to my mind means that we should imitate both the medium and the message of Christ in order to be effective witnesses. Look at the effect of twelve disciples, eleven at the end of the day, who travelled and used the medium of embodied speech to transmit the gospel. Now look at the effect of Joel Osteen, who in a single telecast probably reaches hundreds of thousands more than these eleven did in their entire lifetimes. Which is the more effective? I think contemporary Christianity’s biggest perceptual obstacle is the confusion of numbers with efficacy. It seems like a mindset formed by the market share needs of capitalism, not by the recognition that the salvation of individuals is the key to it all. When you look at Christ’s effect, he primarily affected individual lives, very rarely the group. Even in the feeding of the five thousand, the miracle was that everyone ate, not that they had their lives transformed. The individual encounter with Christ, however, that has always been the key to genuine conversion and transformation.

Explain what McLuhan means when he says the Incarnation is the one time form and content are the same.

“The medium is the message” was McLuhan’s famous dictum, by which he meant the form dictates a lot more of the content than ever previously recognized. But it was never a literal truth, only a helpful metaphor to help the individual perceive how the medium shapes the message. But it WAS literally the case, McLuhan said, in one and only one case: Jesus Christ. In that case, the medium and the message are literally one and the same. This is the key to understanding McLuhan, and his media theory, and is equivalent to Einstein’s C, the one constant in a universe where everything else is relative. Interested readers should consult The Medium and the Light (1999, Stoddart) edited by Eric McLuhan, or see my forthcoming piece in the Renascence journal entitled “The Medium Is the Messiah.”

I’m posting this on our CLC website, having done this interview over the Internet. Is that ironic? Are we hypocrites?

It is ironic indeed. But it’s also fast, cheap, effective, and cool! My hope is that as a result of reading it, readers will be inclined to reverse engineer their engagement with media: by reading a book next, and then by following that up by inviting me to speak — live and in person! – to their campus, group, or church. I’m much funnier in person…

But to be serious: the beginning of a technology’s use does not have to be its end. If your close friend is dying of cancer, and you shoot him a quick e-mail of regret and sorrow before he goes, well then that would be a shame. But if you use e-mail to arrange a time to visit in person, then that’s redeeming the shallowness of e-mail for the purpose of real embodied communication. So the hypocritical use of a medium can always turn into something valuable, just as what man meant for evil God can use for good.

We simply swim in tech nowadays. Most of us couldn’t do our jobs without our computers, at least: word processing, the web as a major source of information, email for communications, et cetera. How does one swim against this tide?

There are two valid options, as I see it. The first is actually the easiest: become Amish. The second is even harder: swim upstream. McLuhan compared it to an Edgar Allen Poe short story called The Maelstrom. By noticing the pattern or effect of the whirlpool, one man in the story saves himself by jumping out of the ship and clinging to a piece of flotsam that is strangely swirling up instead of being sucked down by the whirlpool. So too can we devise a strategy of individual survival by being good at pattern recognition and by paying constant attention to the ways in which new media and technology can pull us down into their unintended side effects. It’s no surprise that the DSM V will have the most entries at the same point in human history as we have the highest number of new technologies to create psychic imbalances in our built environment.

How should Christian leaders – clergy, lay leaders, music ministers, etc. – think about using tech in their ministries?

Very very carefully. My first recommendation is to read Jacques Ellul’s “Effect on Churches” section of Propaganda. My second is to recognize that the church is not competing with Starbucks, the mall, or the movie theater for audiences. I think Henri Nouwen gets it right [in his In the Name of Jesus – ed.] when he says that the leaders of the future will be those who have the courage of being culturally irrelevant, because they will recognize that what the soul in technological society truly craves is the worship of the true and living God, not the temporary two-hour appeasement of the burden of self-consciousness that can be had anywhere else and with higher production values. So recognizing that worship and entertainment are not synonyms, understanding how icons (cultural and religious) work both semiotically and spiritually, knowing that “ecclesia” is the people and not the building, and knowing that value is a function of scarcity (and not repeatability), that is where I would start with teaching clergy how to think about tech use in their ministries. By and large, most people hate church for the same reason they hate meetings run by PowerPoint: if I can get this electronically on my laptop at my own convenience, why am I even here?

Should we be using things like the Amazon Kindle or the iPad, or do such devices damage our sensibilities?

Christians created the book culture in the west, so it would be historically ironic if we uncreated it by adopting the e-books that are out there. Ultimately, I think this is a question of tangibility. You want to be able to have it embodied, and to take on a life of its own, which is why you can’t or won’t throw away that dog-eared copy of _______ that you’ve had since college. Your notes in the margin, your favorite pages worn so thin from re-reading, all this is true religion: to re-read is the meaning of relegere, and that may be where the word religion comes from (the other option being religere, to rebind, which is also a book metaphor as well as an effect of re-reading). If we are what we repeatedly do, then re-reading Scripture is crucial to defining us as a people of faith, historically known as a people of the book. But I think for Christians (unlike Jews or Moslems who are also a people of the book) this has a special significance because the core of our belief is that the Word was made flesh, the story, the narrative, the idea, the invisible God actually becomes embodied in this physical and fallen world, and takes on our suffering. I think real books embody that same thing in a way that e-books simply can’t. So I wouldn’t say that e-books are going to kill or damage our sensibility, but I would say that hardcopy books are much more inclined to preserve this metaphysical bias and understanding.

What does tech do to religion?

Of the five great technological eras (Oral, Writing, Printing, Electronic, Digital), the digital era has had the most interesting unintended side effects on religious practices. I say “interesting” because they are (a) still not entirely known and (b) still not fully assessable in the greater context. My next book, coming out from InterVarsity Press, is on this very subject and is tentatively titled Seven Vices of the Virtual Life. It is not “The” seven vices, because there may be more or less (just as the original seven vices were eight originally), but by “vice” I mean unintended consequence or “side-effect” and these are all quite new problems created by the new technologies. So this hopes to be the first Christian critique of media that is based on form, not content, and thus much less of a moralizing book than a helpful guide through the waters of media effects. So, for example, I don’t have a chapter on pornography as one of the ‘bad’ things about modern media, even though it so obviously is. Instead I’m looking at how the form of modern mass media creates information overload, which yields the new problems of desensitization, individual numbness and collective indifference, what psychologists have called ‘empathy fatigue’ for a decade or more now. In this context, pornography can be understood as a subset of this larger problem. Interestingly, it seems to be a self-sustaining feedback mechanism at play: the user logs on, surfs around, feels bored, disconnected, disembodied, and then turns to porn and masturbation to ‘get in touch’ with his physical being. Older media forms didn’t produce this effect in anything close to these numbers. For women, the temptation to “cutting” is quite similar: users report the common perception that in cutting themselves they are not worried they might die. Instead, they cut as an answer to the fear that they might not be alive: they cut themselves to confirm their physical existence. Only a media environment that had first disembodied and desensitized the user to that extent could produce such an effect. Why men tend to re-embody themselves with self-stimulated pleasure and women with self-stimulated pain is a question for the psychologists, so the book contains a lot of what McLuhan called “probes” – questions that may or may not have currently known answers, but deserve to be investigated.

I think Dreher is certainly on to something. Tyler Wigg Stevenson asks a similar question in Brand Jesus when he wonders what part of his life he is dependent on God for when he has a high-paying job, medical insurance, life insurance, nice suburban existence in a safe neighborhood, good schools, and is white, heterosexual, and middle class. The answer, of course, is less and less. And this gets back to the earlier point about technological development ultimately yielding a collective loss of faith. No one has ever done a correlation study comparing atheism-to-theism levels of iPhone-to-landline users, but it might yield interesting results. With over 500,000 apps available, the user can literally become a god by having “the whole world in his hands.” Is the Church countering this effectively by endorsing the preparation-for-confession app? I have my doubts. But your question also gets back to the ancient story of why Abram left Ur: worshiping gods made by human hands is a form of technology worship. Abraham is the first to realize this is wrong and becomes the founder of monotheism. May his descendants be blessed and many!

At the end of May my wife Jane and I hosted a group from Whitworth University on a tour of Reformation and German Church Struggle sites in Germany. In Berlin I took the group to a lovely villa in the suburb of Wannsee, where on January 20, 1942, fifteen German military and industrial leaders were summoned to determine “a total solution to the Jewish question.” Prior to the meeting the authorities determined the number of people in Germany and its occupied territories that “the Jewish question” involved. By their count, eleven million Jews needed to be “liquidated.” The Wannsee Conference didn’t plan the Holocaust—that had been done earlier by the Nazi High Command, especially by Hitler and Göring. The purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to harness the military-industrial complex of Nazi Germany to implement the Holocaust. It was a “working lunch,” we might say, and it took only ninety minutes.

To walk through this serene and stately residence, now a well-appointed museum, which became the site of perhaps the most terrible infamy in human history, is a life-changing experience. The dining room where the group gathered documents the various steps of the program: evicting Jews from homes and residences, transporting them to holding facilities and extermination camps, confiscating and disbursing their property, work details in the camps, mass murder facilities, harvesting their clothing, hair, gold in their teeth, burning their bodies. The final particular: destroy the camps and all evidence related to the Final Solution. Pictures of the fifteen participants, each with a brief biography, surround the room. Some are known to anyone modestly familiar with World War II: Reinhard Heydrich, Göring’s deputy who called and chaired the meeting; Adolf Eichmann, transportation czar (later apprehended by Israeli secret service, tried in Jerusalem, and executed in 1961); Roland Freisler, the judge who transformed courtrooms into exhibitions of Nazi hysteria; Heinrich Müller, chief of Gestapo. Other members are less well-known, but no less important. On the whole, the group consisted of mid to upper-level managers, eight of whom had earned doctorates. Killing eleven million people exceeds the expertise of most managers. Two people with practical experience in killing were therefore invited to the lunch—Rudolf Lange and Eberhard Schöngarth (both with Ph.Ds). Lange had personally ordered, overseen, or participated in mass shootings of 60,000 Jews in Russia.

I did not speak much about these infamous members of the Conference, and for two reasons. For one, their criminality is so obvious and massive that few of us can identify with them. That is not to say that we could not do similar things—we probably could, given the right circumstances and opportunities. But we don’t think we could. It would take a lot of effort to convince us otherwise, and I wasn’t in the mood to make us think worse of ourselves. Second and more important, I don’t think we have much to learn from Heydrichs and Eichmanns. C. S. Lewis said that all the world’s tyrants are more or less alike. That seems especially true in the case of the Nazi high command. Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” with respect to people like Eichmann. Banality is an uninspiring and ultimately unsuccessful teacher.

I directed our attention to an unassuming photograph on the wall. Perhaps even Holocaust scholars would not recognize the name, Dr. Gerhard Klopfer—with an appropriately banal title, “Permanent Secretary, Department III, State Affairs.” Klopfer was in fact one of the most influential and best informed bureaucrats of the Nazi regime. He was a lawyer, and he chaired the Constitutional Law Section of the Nazi Party. He drafted the legislation, made possible by the Nürnberg Laws of 1935, which made the Holocaust legal, and ushered it through the German legal system. Once legal, the larger society could be conscripted in all the necessary ways to execute it. This unassuming man, I suggested, was the most deadly guest at Wannsee. Eliminate any other member of the Conference and the Holocaust would have happened more or less as it did; eliminate Klopfer it probably would not have integrated the German infrastructure so successfully in its accomplishment.

Of the fifteen participants at Wannsee, only two were executed after the war. Klopfer was not one of them. Seven participants resumed “normal” life after the war, Klopfer among them. He was imprisoned briefly after the War, but he was never charged with a serious offense. He had done nothing illegal, he had never been arrested, he had no police record. So far as we know, he never killed a Jew. Given the fact that only two percent of Germany society was Jewish, he may never have known a Jew. He had confiscated no Jewish furniture, nor participated in the gruesome death machines of Buchenwald or Auschwitz. Here was a leading foreman of the Holocaust, but the best the courts could do was to declare him “minimally incriminated.” That is legal terminology for a misdemeanor.

The British Observer once characterized Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Minister of the War Economy, as “a technologically competent barbarian.” That’s a good description of Klopfer. He possessed legal acumen and drive, and he was willing to sell his services to the highest bidder without any apparent interest in their consequences. On January 20, 1942, Klopfer lunched with the devil at Wannsee, and then went home to enjoy a quiet evening with his family. By 1952 he was back in Ulm as a tax consultant, by 1956 he resumed his law practice, and he died in 1987 at age eighty-two. He was a respected professional in Ulm, perhaps a member of the Barristers’ Guild and a service club.

The presence of a man like Klopfer at the Wannsee Conference makes it much more terrifying than it would be if only Eichmanns were present. Not many of us are like Eichmann, but it is easy to belike Klopfer. Indeed, it is hard not to be like him. We do not know to what degree he was aware—or whether aware at all—of the gap between legality and morality. From our perspective, the gap was catastrophic. In this respect he may be a good reminder to us, not because our issues are the same as his—they most definitely are not—but because he is a graphic reminder that the question of legality cannot be properly answered apart from the larger and ultimate question of morality. Forty years ago such things as gambling, marijuana, abortion, same-sex marriage, government sponsored assassinations, government surveillance of citizen communications and correspondence, drone invasion of foreign airspaces, erection of a defense perimeter on the Mexican border were (or would have been) considered illegal largely because they were considered immoral. In the intervening years the category of morality has been progressively abandoned, and today all these things are legal. Once morality is abandoned, a man like Klopfer becomes a rather uncomfortable example.

The Christian Leadership Center is pleased to publish the online version of the “Edwards Epistle,” a longstanding quarterly letter providing the reflections of Dr. James R. Edwards, Bruner-Welch Professor of Theology at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Readers are invited also to subscribe to the print edition by contacting Phil Olson.

]]>http://www.clcumary.com/james-edwards-the-difference-between-legal-and-moral/feed/0Denis McNamara on Church Architecturehttp://www.clcumary.com/denis-mcnamara-on-church-architecture/
http://www.clcumary.com/denis-mcnamara-on-church-architecture/#commentsMon, 09 Jul 2012 15:12:05 +0000http://www.clcumary.com/?p=1151Read more →]]>Dr. Denis McNamara of the Liturgical Institute in Mundelein Seminary at Illinois now has a series on church architecture up on YouTube. The University of Mary was privileged to have Dr. McNamara speak as part of the Artists Celebrating Christ festival in March. He’s the author of Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy as well as How to Read Churches: A Crash Course in Ecclesiastical Architecture. The series is 10 videos of roughly 7 minutes each.